Next American City » Magazine » Organizing like Jesus

Over a thousand people had gathered into a small Baptist church, and they were angry.

It was July 31, 2000 in North Philadelphia, and the U.S. Presidential campaign was just heating up. The people in the church, however, hadn’t gathered to support a candidate. They had gathered because of the failure of both political parties.

“Our homes are not fit for human life!” one woman at the church cried, motioning to the neighborhood around her. The crowd of 1,000, most of them poor minorities, sang together and prayed together. Then they stood up and chanted questions aloud to Governor Bush, whose Presidential convention was beginning just a few miles away. Governor Bush, they cried, will you help restore our neighborhoods? Will you pay attention to the poor?

A few weeks earlier, this group–the East Coast branch of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)–had literally stopped traffic in New York City with another attempt to highlight the crisis they see in low-income housing: placing a full-sized house in the street near Al Gore’s campaign office.

Being so confrontational hasn’t exactly made the IAF the darling of the political establishment. Even the Democratic Party, whose left wing probably agrees with the IAF more than it disagrees, has been slow to embrace it. Yet it would be a mistake for the Democrats to ignore the IAF’s strategy. The IAF and similar “faith-based community organizing groups” are grassroots, religious, and urban. They have remarkable potential to build urban power bases and strip conservatives of their monopoly over religion–but so far, that potential is only partly fulfilled.

Sixty Years of Organizing Like Jesus

Community organizing was launched in the 1940s by Saul Alinsky, the founder of the IAF. Today, there are four national community organizing networks–the IAF, the Gamaliel Foundation, the Pacific Institute for Community Organization (PICO), and the Direct Action Research and Training Center (DART)–which together have over 130 active local faith-based community organizing groups, made up of 4,000 member institutions and reaching between one and three million people nationwide.

Local faith-based organizing groups are composed of community institutions–mainly congregations, but also non-religious groups such as unions. Individuals get involved through those institutions, taking on campaigns to effect changes in their neighborhoods–whether that means getting liquor stores near schools shut down, forcing local Kmarts to stop selling guns, or kicking drug dealers off of street corners. A few paid employees, called “organizers,” goad and guide the group members, but the ideas and motivation for the campaigns come from the members themselves. Local groups may be linked with a national network like Gamaliel or the IAF, but traditionally the networks only provide guidance and leadership training and do not initiate or carry out campaigns themselves.

Faith-based community organizing sees itself as descended from a rich tradition of grassroots religious activism, including the Civil Rights Movement; organizers are fond of pointing out that Jesus himself was an organizer. Religion motivates many of the people involved in community organizing, and provides a sense of shared values and commitment. “Faith is absolutely central to what we do,” says Reverend Dr. Dennis Jacobsen, a leader with the Milwaukee Gamaliel group and the director of the Gamaliel clergy caucus. “We are constantly asking ourselves the questions: how does this strengthen our congregations? How does this address our values?”

Putting Values into Action

What faith-based community organizing groups understand, and liberals often do not, is that bringing faith and politics together at the grassroots level helps people find meaning in both. In his book Race Matters, Cornel West argues that liberals ignore the greatest problem facing Black America–a nihilistic sense of worthlessness and despair–because liberals are too afraid to talk about values and meaning in life. “If there is a hidden taboo among liberals,” he writes, “it is to resist talking too much about values because such discussions remove the focus from structures and especially because they obscure the positive role of government.”

Faith-based community organizing groups take traditionally conservative language of “values” and “personal responsibility” and use it to enact real change in communities that the Right ignores and the Left takes for granted. One of Alinsky’s greatest legacies is the “Iron”–not “Golden”–rule: “Don’t do for others what they could do for themselves.” Rather than just providing services for the poor, the groups provide a mechanism for individuals to hold systems accountable and confront the forces that create despair. Reverend John Baumann, Executive Director of PICO, casts this mission in religious terms: “We try to recapture the prophetic imaginations of our communities and our families, so that families are able to make changes in the community and have a better quality of life.”

The IAF and its peers don’t just make for fascinating theory–they actually succeed. In addition to affecting their own neighborhoods, organizing groups have also launched projects that have had national influence. The living wage campaign, which has raised the salaries of many workers around the country, originated with the IAF’s Baltimore affiliate, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD). A New York IAF group, East Brooklyn Congregations, started building homes for low-income people (“Nehemiah homes”) using a method that has since been adopted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. And Gamaliel’s Gary, Indiana-area affiliate, the Northwest Indiana Federation of Interfaith Organizations, sponsored a land use and transportation plan that helped inspire the national smart growth movement.

In the process, faith-based community organizing groups also build the power of their cities. From the perspective of urban politicians, organized inner city residents are votes. A mayor may lobby all he wants, but will be much more persuasive if national politicians know he is backed by thousands of noisy voters.

Growing Pains

For all of its success, faith-based community organizing is still not as powerful as it could be. It does not attract ready media attention; it is not nearly as influential as the labor movement; it has not matched the Christian Coalition’s use of religion for political purposes.

Like many progressive groups, faith-based community organizing has a general problem dealing with the media and explaining itself to the outside world. The IAF, despite being the most established network, is surprisingly difficult to contact or understand structurally. While several of the larger affiliates have their own websites, the network itself does not have an official website (the closest equivalent is an amateur website put up by a leader in the Chicago IAF affiliate). Its executive director, Ed Chambers, is also notoriously unwilling to talk to the media (and never responded to a request for an interview for this article).

The configuration of the networks cements the problem: local groups have names distinct from the national organizations. You might be impressed by the transportation-related activism done by Detroit’s MOSES (Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength), but you won’t necessarily make the connection to its affiliated network, Gamaliel, let alone to any of Gamaliel’s other groups. Confusion over names may have serious practical consequences, leading reporters and politicians to underestimate the power and popularity of the organizing networks.

Alongside their image problems, faith-based organizing groups diminish their own power through infighting. Several interviewed organizers referred to a turf war between organization networks, and particularly faulted the IAF for refusing to work with the newer networks. “There’s unfortunately pretty minimal dialogue between the networks,” says Greg Galluzzo, the Executive Director of Gamaliel. “Dell Computer and IBM probably have more conversations with each other than Gamaliel and the IAF.”

Even the grassroots nature of community organizing presents its own set of difficulties. While organizing groups try very hard to take their cue from members, this process can become problematic when the groups tackle problems caused by broader forces outside of their communities. “Some issues in communities come very directly from the grassroots,” says Galluzzo, “but other issues are more complicated… Urban sprawl actually creates a concentration of poverty. Now, no one will tell you that if you knock on doors.”

The more complex the problem that groups undertake, the more likely the organizer will become the principal strategist of the organization. Giving the organizer more power is not bad in and of itself; leaders may indeed have limited perspectives. Yet without careful effort, groups can lose their focus on developing new leaders from the communities they serve. This dilemma arises particularly when projects–especially economic development work or social service provision–require a lot of specialized knowledge, making organizers more important than befits the groups’ philosophies.

A national survey of faith-based community organizing groups, conducted by Interfaith Funders, reflects this tension. Organizers had mixed opinions about their experiences in economic development and social service work. While some felt that the work had enhanced the respect and credibility of their organizations, others made comments like “[It’s had a] negative effect, due to the focus on programming. This takes lots of time away from the tasks of organizing.”

Some groups mitigate the problem by ensuring they have a stable power base before taking on complex projects. Mark Warren, a Harvard sociologist and author of the national survey, notes that the famous San Antonio IAF group had been established for fifteen years before it started working on the job-training project that brought it national attention. “We would say that power needs to precede programs,” comments Jonathan Lange, lead organizer of Baltimore’s BUILD. “There’s always a tension as you move into, say, governance. You can’t stay there; if you do, you turn yourself into a really good community development program.”

The National Arena

A similar problem of self-definition has plagued faith-based community organizing groups’ attempts to determine what role they want to play in politics beyond the local level. All four of the groups are still better categorized as national networks than national organizations. PICO is tentatively exploring national strategies and Gamaliel recently decided to take a first step onto the national stage with an immigrant civil rights campaign. The IAF, in contrast, has explicitly not moved beyond regional-level organizing. Jonathan Lange, who is both the BUILD organizer and a member of the IAF’s national staff, puts his network’s position very bluntly: “There is no national agenda. Local issues are developed entirely at the local level.”

The major non-faith-based community organizing group, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), provides a contrasting model. ACORN has grown out of the same culture and history as faith-based community organizing. Founded in 1970, ACORN now involves over 150,000 families, who are organized into chapters as individuals rather than through churches or other institutions. The Executive Director of ACORN, Steve Kest, calls this focus on the individual a pragmatic, not ideological, choice. “It’s our sense that most lower income individuals are not that connected to institutions, even churches, in any sort of really significant way,” Kest says.

Yet ACORN, despite its similarity to faith-based community organizing, has decided that national campaigns and strategy can complement and serve its grassroots model. While even ACORN’s national projects should originate from grassroots concerns, it explicitly engages in partisan politics and tries to address issues that lie beyond city and state control. Last year, for example, it played a major advocacy role during Congressional debates on welfare reform reauthorization. ACORN’s efforts at national recognition are also aided by the fact that all ACORN member groups bear the word “ACORN” in their title. Working with this broader strategy on many of the same issues as faith-based community organizing groups, ACORN has arguably had a lot of success. Beyond its rapid growth as an organization, it has also founded a labor union for low-wage service workers, created progressive radio stations, rehabilitated housing and provided pre-purchase loan counseling, and helped found the progressive Working Families Party.

ACORN’s model is by no means the panacea for faith-based community organizing. The group has its own problems, including the common perception of a high turnover rate in both citizen and organizer involvement–an allegation Kest denies. Faith-based organizing groups face a serious risk when scaling-up their efforts; while many of the issues they care about cannot be solved at the local level, working at a national level could endanger the unique grassroots nature of the organizations.

At the very least, however, it is hard to imagine that faith-based community organizing can really fulfill its potential without many more local groups, and without more coordination between the groups. To influence national politics, the groups would not necessarily need a national agenda, but they would need to be seen as a coherent presence. An organized and voting group of low-income individuals in every major American city might have some political weight to throw around on the national level.

Tremendous Promise

People who worry about the declining power of faith, urban communities, and the progressive movement would do well to look at faith-based community organizing. Its power as a model comes from reclaiming religious rhetoric from the Right and restoring meaning to people’s lives while making real changes in people’s streets and communities. While faith-based community organizing provides a case study of the challenges inherent in grassroots movements, it also holds profound promise for cities and the politicians who represent them.